Inhofe: Obama administration trying to ‘dry up’ ammo supply [AUDIO]

On Aaron Klein’s weekend show on New York City’s WABC radio, Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe accused the Obama administration of buying up ammunition at an unprecedented level to bypass the Second Amendment so gun-owners “can’t even buy ammunition because government is purchasing so much.”

“Let’s make sure that your audience out there is aware, Aaron, that our president, Obama, has been doing everything he could to stop the private ownership of guns in America,” Inhofe said. “You know that, everyone knows that. And yet he’s been voted down in a big way by a large majority. And so my feeling is that he’s doing this to buy up [ammunition] so that we can’t buy: Honest, law-abiding citizens here in the United States, like my son, can’t even buy ammunition because government is purchasing so much.”

Inhofe explained to Klein he is working to introduce the Ammunition Management for More Obtainability (AMMO) bill that will limit “non-defense, armed federal agencies to pre-Obama levels of ammunition.”

“It’s designed to have the GAO (that’s the Government Accounting Office) inventory — not the Defense Department, but all other departments that use weaponry — as to what they’re doing in terms of the amount of ammunition that they have bought to dry up the market for honest, law-abiding citizens,” Inhofe said.

The Oklahoma Republican called the buy-ups intentional and referred to testimony last month from Nick Nayak, the Department of Homeland Security’s chief procurement officer, who said DHS has the right to buy up the ammunition.

“I believe it’s intentional,” Inhofe said. “Now we had someone testify the other day the DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, has the ‘right’ — this is a bureaucrat that said this — they have the ‘right’ to buy as much as they want, and they’re planning to buy 750 million rounds. Well, that is more than three times the amount that our soldiers are using for training to defend our nation. So, it’s just another effort to restrict gun activity and ownership. We have in this country the Second Amendment, that preserves the right to keep and bear arms, and the president doesn’t believe in that.”

Inhofe was skeptical of theory that the ammo buy-up was an effort by DHS to seize power from the state, as some have suggested, but did say it was unprecedented and shouldn’t be allowed.

“This has never happened in this country before,” he added. “We’ve never had government trying to take that much control at the expense of the law-abiding citizens. And we’re not going to let it happen.”